Kandria
How does one market a video game?
Nick
This week was supposed to be holidays for me, but it didn't really end up being very relaxing. There wasn't anything I wanted to read, watch, play, or work on, so I spent most of my time just sort of meandering around in melancholy. I did make some minor improvements to small projects, but overall I don't know how worth it was to do this intermission.
I also got really stressed out again about the marketing efforts for Kandria. We've had this mailing list for over a year now, with a new update every week. We even have the offer of a free demo to invite people to subscribe. And yet, despite all that, in this year we barely got over 150 subscribers together. By the size of usual mailing lists, that's peanuts.
The problem is almost definitely in the 'top of the funnel' or 'exposure marketing'. Meaning we're not getting enough people to see stuff about Kandria in the first place. We have to broaden our efforts in that and post to reddit, imgur, and so forth to try and fix that, but even just thinking about all of that makes me really exhausted somehow.
I did try out a new marketing effort last week, by putting up an ad on Facebook for a week. The ad was just the new trailer we put together with a link to the steam page. I targeted it rather broad, selecting all english speaking countries and narrowing it to people ages 16+ with an interest in action games. I can share the results from that here:
ThruPlays: 3'029 (At least 15 seconds play)
Reach: 16'628 (Overwhelmingly in the 13-17 male demographic)
Impressions: 22'880
3-second video plays: 9'110
Average view time: 7 seconds (Sure wish they had a median)
Link clicks: 26
If we only consider the ThruPlays, we have about a 1% conversion ratio to clicks, which seems average. Now, what's interesting is if we look at the data on Steam:
Visits: 310
Tracked Visits: 81 (How many of those were logged in)
Wishlists: 0 (What steam reports for the Facebook link)
Wishlists: 12 (Total during those two weeks regardless of source)
Somehow we got a lot more visits than Facebook reports as link clicks. I don't really know what this means. Did some of those people share it with others, with the Facebook tracker still in the URL? There was a tiny increase in wishlists compared to our average of about one per day during this week, but somehow Steam's report shows none of the Facebook direct URLs converted to wishlists at all. Why?
While data is always cool to speculate about I don't really know what all this means or what to make of it. 0 wishlists and the overall conversion ratio are both really low, so I don't know if this is worth putting a lot more time and money into. Of course, one can't expect too much from a first attempt – you're supposed to iterate and try a lot of different demographics and video cuts and so forth to see how to hone in on your audience.
Either way, this stuff not only costs my time but also money that I'm already pretty stripped to the bone on, so I don't know how much more I'm going to do with Facebook ads. It was worth trying at least once for sure, though.
For now I think it would be better to focus our efforts on posting on imgur and reddit and see if that gets us anywhere. For those I'm mostly concerned about how to post stuff that's actually interesting for those communities and how to avoid getting immediately blasted to shit because, well, ultimately we're still trying to advertise.
I'm also still waiting to see what comes of that Pro Helvetia call for marketing support that we got approved for. We haven't really heard anything for that at all...
If you have any ideas on what we could do to improve our reach, please let me know! I'm sure I'm missing things that might be obvious to you!
Tim
It's been a while since I played all the quests through start to finish, including all the sidequests; so I took the time this week to go through and make sure everything still worked correctly, especially with the recent quest structural changes. This allowed me to hone the dialogue and emotes further, fix some new bugs I encountered, and generally improve ease of use.
Fred
Finally got my PC back and able to get to working more efficiently after almost 3 weeks of it being in repair. Got a few more NPC human designs knocked out and had fun coming up with some variations of animations on how each would stand around. Trying to give a little personality in there. Did some more progress on attemps at new Steam capsule art which is a nice break from pixel art, and now working on a new enemy's animations!
Mikel
Happy Saturday! These last couple of weeks I've been working on the underground ruin's ambience track. I've been listening to a lot of Astral Chain and NieR as inspiration and am slowly beginning to find the right sound. This includes acoustic guitar, pads, lots of aleatoric strings and woodwinds as well as our secret ingredient (Julie Elven :P). We've also decided this track should have 3 versions to transition between, including exploration, combat, and puzzle/platforming mode. Hope to show you a rough finished version soon!
Alright
It's back to usual work next week. In the meantime, as mentioned, if you have any ideas about marketing stuff for Kandria, please let me know. And of course, if you have any friends or other communities you know that might be interested in the game, do share it with them!
We've also been thinking about that level design contest again. If you're interested in that, join our Discord to discuss it in more detail!
As always though, thank you for reading, and I hope you have a good weekend!